Madagascar Update #1

Hi everyone!

Well it’s true what you heard, after being evacuated and spending 7 months home in Eugene, I really did make it back to Madagascar! It was hard and all I could see at the time was a big fat door closing in my face, but that old cliché about new doors …so true! In the end I’m so glad it worked out this way. But how awesome now, to be back on this big crazy red island! I’ll try to take it from the beginning:

Last March, about 140 peace corps volunteers were evacuated from Madagascar. After 7 months, the plans to re-open the program were finally realized, and now 14 of us are back here in action, with a minimum contract of one year.

Some ice on the wings of our plane out of Eugene, a delay of about 20 minutes, made me miss all my connecting flights, so I arrived here by myself a day late. Looking out the window, touching down in Madagascar, I could hardly contain myself. I bounded off the plane and shouted hellos in Malagasy to every airport employee I saw. One French man who was sitting near me on the plane politely asked me, “do you live here?”

Since all those who returned to re-open the program had already been volunteers for at least a few months, some people much longer, we all had just a short week of training in the training center outside the capital. Training was mostly a re-cap on techniques, personal medical care and safety issues. Most of us were not going back to our old villages, so had to learn a different dialect of Malagasy, so there were some language classes too. We had some people come in from the US Embassy and the US mission in Madagascar, to brief us on what is happening in this country politically. To be honest, that’s still pretty murky to me. It changes all the time though and right now I couldn’t tell you with a straight face what is happening, but I hope to find out more soon. I can tell you though that it doesn’t affect the rural villages much, and I am probably safer there than I would be in a city at home, so no worrying about that! Training was mostly just a good opportunity for all of us to see each other again, catch up and hang out before we all left for our sites.

I now live in a tiny village in the North of Madagascar, about 15-20 kilometers from a town called Ambilobe…the closest big town you can find on a map. I bank in a town called Diego Suarez (Antsiranana is the Malagasy name), which is where I am right now! There is a Peace Corps flop house here, where all volunteers in the region can meet about once a month. Diego is big and beautiful and developed. There are restaurants that serve pizza, internet cafes and a pool with a swim-up bar. Hard to believe I’ve only gone like 110 kilometers up the road!

My village is the polar opposite, except that it is absolutely gorgeous too, but in a totally different way. If you google “Tsingy Ankarana”, you can see the big national park that is now literally, my back yard. These huge rock spires with lines of trees weaving in and out of them form a backdrop to one side of the village and every so often I stop and think, “I live here!”. The first couple of days I was there, I spent organizing my little house and walking around. (I took a bunch of pictures and a video but forgot to bring the memory card it was on…oops! Next time I’ll post it all!!) One of the people in the village offered to take me to see the caves right near my house. He told me this elaborate story about the war between different Malagasy tribes a long time ago, and about the king and prince that hid in the caves to escape the war. They were too scared to go out and look for food, so they starved to death. And he tells me “and their bones are still in this cave!” And I’m thinking, yeah sure, uh-huh. So we go in and it’s all glittering stalagtites and stalagmites and bats… so awesome! And then sure enough, he leads me to this pile of bones and I can see a human skull peeking out of the dirt. This place has crazy history. It’s all nothing short of magnificent…. or “mahafinaritra”; a Malagasy catch-all adjective I use all the time and roughly translate as: “AWESOME!”.

That awesomeness attracts a lot of tourists to the area. There’s a nice luxury resort only 1 kilometer down the road from my house, and a villager-run campground right next to my house. Both groups are trying to build a program together, that’s supposed to begin in April. The plan is to have tourists stay 1 night in the village, see the caves, eat traditional Malagasy food prepared by villagers, tour around and see what rural Malagasy life is like, then finish with 2 nights at the resort place. It’s trying to get the villagers to benefit as much as possible by the presence of tourists in their backyard. Where I seem to come in, is as sort of a go-between for the 2 groups, and to help the villagers build and get the program running on its own.

Right now though, we’ve just gone into the rainy season, which will last for another few months. So basically from now until March, everyone is going to be really really busy working in their fields so they can get as much food as they can for the year. This makes it really hard to plan and get anyone to come to any meetings, so I’m changing my plans accordingly….I’ll just farm for awhile like them! I already have a corn field and am going to get a rice one hopefully…been planting other food and flowers around my house like crazy. It feels really good to work in the dirt everyday! That connection to the earth is so strong here. Also, I’ve got my mind set on getting some chickens to raise!

Niger evacuated its new training class and is sending fresh volunteers to us here in Madagascar! (It’s been a bad year for Peace Corps Africa…Mauritania, Madagascar, Guinea, now Niger… geez!) So in a couple weeks, a few of use were asked to come in and help train them. They were only in Niger for a couple of weeks when things started to get crazy over there, so we’re going over to help teach techniques, answer their questions and offer support. So it looks like I’ll be in Tana January 11^th -23^rd.

Before we came up here to Diego, I stopped at another environment volunteer, Brittany’s site for a few days. It was fun meeting all her village peeps and seeing a new place! Some highlights: Teaching people how to make a compost pile, eating lychees under a mango tree looking out over her soon-to-be corn field while chatting up some locals, teaching English to 5-50 year-olds all at once, spending the morning shoveling cow shit (ha ha…I took a “play with kids” break half way through!), riding on a tractor (crazy to see actual farm equipment like that here!!!) and being given a Malagasy name by her villagers. Just call me “Soa” (means good or well) from now on. Haha. Now we’re here in Diego (there are 5 of us volunteers) together for a hot, hot Christmas!

Well if you actually got all the way through that long entry, I applaud you. I’ll try to update again soon, when I’m in Tana. Happy Holidays everyone and here is the most important part of this whole thing: My address:

Corie Hinton

6 Rue Commandant Marchand

Place Kabary

Antsiranana 201

Madagascar

Write me!!!

ATTENTION TEACHERS: If you’re wondering how you can get your students involved in helping students in my village, have them do this: make flash cards and have them draw a picture of something on one side, and write the word for it in English on the other, and send them to me. That would help a lot and kids here would love just knowing that kids in America made them just to help them out. Any other ideas, email me.

Always remember that someone loves you in Madagascar!

Corie / Soa

Letter from Corie dated 11/21/09 arrived

Just received this letter today:
Hi Mom & Dad! Well, I've been here about 5 days now and I told you I'd write often so...ha ha. Training was good! Lots of info but mostly just an opportunity to re-adjust. I have to say though that I could NOT wipe the smile off my face in the Tana airport, driving through the streets, getting to the training center, seeing staff and other PCV friends...it felt like a homecoming at least to a degree. I know my culture shock is probably yet to come, but it will at least be a lot less intense, so it seems. My site sounds really amazing. The staff keeps telling me how beautiful it is with the tsingy right outside my door, the small size of the village, the privacy, the supportive community, the way people take care of one another. I've heard a lot of good things and can't wait to see it! I am of course nervous though! I'm really excited to be able to get a garden going and set up my new house.
Tomorrow we are all going back to Tana to shop (buy a phone!), hang out and do last-minute paperwork and stuff, then we swear-in at the U.S. ambassador's house on Tuesday, then we fly/drive out to site on Wednesday. There are 10 regular PCV's and 4 PC Response people (they are on 6-month contracts with NGO's). Seems to be a good group. Hope you guys are doing well! Happy Thanksgiving! Love you! -- Cor

12/13 Gardening and making lesson plans

We had a short call with Corie before her cell battery died. (She had just talked with her sister Jaime prior to our call.) Corie is busy making lesson plans to teach environmental classes in the elementary school after the new year begins. She'll be meeting with the principal sometime this week about her ideas. She's busy putting in her garden and has planted lettuce, corn, cantalope, pumpkin, zucchini and beans. She's been meeting new people and they have been very friendly. She told us she's learned a lot from her last experience and is not as concerned with all the drama that can happen in a small village. She just wants to do her work, stay active in the community and not worry about the inevitable gossip or whether people like her or not. She'll soon be visiting another PC volunteer in her village and helping to plant rice on her way up north to Diego to spend the holidays with other PC folks. That's it for now...happy holidays everyone!

Corie follows mom as Elementary School Teacher

Dad here, with update from a call last night: Corie talked to the elementary school principle and they agreed that Corie will start teaching an environmental class once a week in the school. She also said that this school has no toilet and Corie wants to help procure the funds (under $200) to build one. She'll start working w/ PC to get funding and said it shouldn't take too long because under $200 gets funded automatically. She says that the villagers are motivated and she see lots of potential here. That could be because of the extra time villagers have due to the short rice season on this side of the island. It starts to rain in December and weather allows a 3-month growing season, then the harvest. Very different than her previous village where they grew rice the entire year. She's also involved with the village's Eco-Tourism group that meets every Tuesday. They have built two primitive bungalows about 100 yards from Corie's house. They hope to do more, add signage and develop a brochure which Corie is excited about helping them create it. She has met with the Cuban and French man who are developing the upscale resort about 2km from her village. Eventually they hope to do a tour that will allow guests 2 nites in the posh resort and 2 nites in her village bungalows. They also want to buy a cart and a cow to pull it and set up tours in the village, seeing the women's craft work and generally experience the village life. They told Corie that European tourists are very interested in this aspect. Corie is acting as the liason between these 2 guys and the village to get some projects started. She is meeting lots of people and went to church last week which helped her meet even more. People are generally friendly, more used to having foreigners around and less skeptical of white people than she's experienced in the past. Probably because of the adjacent Ankarana Reserve Park and the foriegn tourists that it draws. It seems to her like there are many more varieties of people and tribes represented in her village. She's taking lots of pictures and will try to post them when she goes to Diego (banking town) over Christmas. The PC house that she will stay in Diego has a dvd player and computer, but no Internet so she'll find a web cafe to post photos. We asked her about her food and said she's been eating dried shrimp, tomatoes, beans, onions and of course...rice. She's not sure if she'll be called to Tana, the capital to assist in training for the 35 Environment PCV's that were recently evacuated from Niger and placed in Mad. To sum up her experience so far, she said she feels INSPIRED. "It seems like the Feb. Mad PC evacuation was almost supposed to happen so that I could get relocated in a place that I could do more with the people."